Free Dudes, the School Is Haunted! by R. L. Stine Page B

elevator. And it brought me here, to my
friends.”
    “Welcome back,” Mary said, putting a gray arm around the shoulders of
Thalia’s dress. The color on the dress had already started to fade.
    “You’re right. This is where you belong,” Seth told her.
    “When you escaped, we thought about you all the time,” Mona added. “We
wondered how you were doing. And we wondered if you would come back for us.”
    “You don’t want to go there,” Thalia replied. “And I don’t want to go back.
We don’t belong there. We cannot live there. I don’t want to pretend anymore. I
just want to stay here with you and be myself.”
    She pulled a makeup kit and a tube of lipstick from her bag and tossed it
down on a desktop. “No more makeup. No more lipstick. No more pretending.”
    “But what about us ?” Ben cried. “Tommy and I have only a minute or two
more before we’re totally gray!”
    “Aren’t you going to help us escape from here?” I pleaded. “Aren’t you going
to help us get back?”
    Thalia shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, guys.”

 
 
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    I swallowed hard, thinking about home. My dad. My new mom. My dog.
    I’ll never see them again, I realized.
    I’ll never see color again. Never see blue ocean waves or a red,
setting sun.
    “I’m sorry, guys,” Thalia repeated. “Sorry I didn’t explain this to you right
away.”
    “Explain what?” I cried.
    “I think I can get you back to the other side,” she said.
    She picked up her lipstick tube. “This is how I escaped a few weeks ago,” she
said. “This lipstick tube was buried in my bag for fifty years. I’d forgotten
all about it.”
    She unscrewed the cap and showed us the bright red lipstick. “I found it a
few weeks ago. When I opened it, it was still red!” Thalia exclaimed. “It was
some kind of miracle. Maybe because it had been closed up. It still had its color.”
    Thalia moved to the wall. “I was so excited to see the color red after fifty
years,” she explained. “I started drawing on the wall with it. And to my shock,
wherever I spread the lipstick, it made a hole in the wall!”
    “That’s amazing!” Eddie cried.
    The others excitedly agreed.
    “The lipstick burned right through the wall,” Thalia continued. “I—I was so
shocked, I didn’t know what to do. I drew a window on the wall. And I climbed
through it. I escaped. That’s how I did it.”
    She raised the lipstick tube to the gray wall. “I tried to come back for you
guys,” she told her friends. “But the hole closed up as soon as I went through
it.”
    She frowned. “I drew a lipstick window on the wall on the other side. But in
the real world, lipstick is only lipstick. It didn’t work. I couldn’t get back
to you. I had no way of finding you, no way to return here.”
    I glanced at Ben. To my horror, he had turned completely gray. Except…
except for the tip of his nose.
    “Thalia—hurry!” I begged. “Draw a window for Ben and me! Please—we don’t
have any time left!”
    Without another word, she turned to the wall.
    Her hand moved quickly, outlining a red window. Filling it in.
    “Hurry! Please, hurry!” I pleaded, staring as she frantically rubbed the red
lipstick over the wall.
    Would it work?

 
 
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    As soon as she finished the window, I grabbed Ben. I shoved him through the
hole. “Come on!” I cried. “We can do it!”
    “Good-bye, Ben. Good-bye, Tommy,” the others called.
    Halfway through the wall, I turned back to them. “Come with us!” I cried.
“Hurry! You can come with us!”
    “No, we can’t,” Seth called sadly.
    “Thalia is right. We’d hate it. We belong here now,” Mary said.
    “Don’t forget me!” Thalia called. Her voice broke with sadness. She turned
away.
    I turned too. Turned to the other world, our world. Ben and I stepped
through the wall. And found ourselves back in school.
    I heard music booming down the hall. Kids shouting and laughing.
    The dance!
    We were back at